Jack White - Blunderbuss

incidentally it didn't occur to me until the article noted his age that White is only 36 and that i am kind of jealous of how much he's accomplished.

;_; Mooney Suzuki

man, nicky i think you are WAY off, dude's a total obsessive music nerd IMO, like starting the white stripes in fucking detroit at that time is a truly stupid idea if you wanted to be famous, i mean fuck they were on sympathy for the record industry...there was like no reason to ever expect they'd graduate from like opening for The Makers or bands like that...

― Mississippi Butt Hurt (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, April 10, 2012 9:55 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

m@tt otm, i'm not much of a fan of White but the second-guessing itt about his entire existence is pretty over the top, he's really just a true blue '90s indie retro rock weirdo who grinded and lucked his way into superstardom

― some dude, Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:01 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no doubt, a total obsessive music nerd, and a very hard working enthusiastic chap as well. playing with meg in dives and street festivals for two years before making the first album. Recording that classic debut in his father's living room over the course of a weekend, and then recording 2 more classics in the next 2 years...

― nicky lo-fi, Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:05 AM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess in a way they were kinda one of the last gasps of 90s indie rock culture that broke, like i'm sure their original big rockstar fantasies would have been to be as big as, like, jon spencer blues explosion

― Mississippi Butt Hurt (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:06 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and i have no regrets about rock fandom in the late 90s & early 00s. great time to be going out to see underattended punk shows in sleazy dives.

so this is out there new, getting now.

new

Tracklist:

01. Missing Pieces 3:27
02. Sixteen Saltines 2:37
03. Freedom At 21 2:51
04. Love Interruption 2:38
05. Blunderbuss 3:06
06. Hypocritical Kiss 2:50
07. Weep Themselves To Sleep 4:19
08. I’m Shakin’ 3:00
09. Trash Tongue Talker 3:20
10. Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy 3:03
11. I Guess I Should Go To Sleep 2:37
12. On And On And On 3:55
13. Take Me With You When You Go 4:10

Release date: 24 april 2012

he hasn't made anything i've loved since elephant, and i'm not sure if that's bc he's changed or if i've changed. in either case, i kinda keep an eye on him to see if anything he does is really interesting again. seems like a lot of boring side projects like raconteurs, dead weather, black belles? maybe the magic is just gone

i think he's got a free pass to fuck around with merely solid side projects and Third Man vinyl nerd ephemera for a little while. i'm still entertained by it all.

2nd Raconteurs album was A+, imo

digging "Sixteen Saltines" a lot.

I had very low expectations of this but it is easily his best album in a decade, albeit a decade in which I have only really liked a couple of Raconteurs songs and little else. I dont understand this notion of Jack lacking authenticity, he is from a working class background and dragged himself up from nothing. I get a feeling he doesn't really have much control of this beast he has created, but that doesn't make him a phony.

I'm lukewarm over this. It's sorta plain jane. It's like a 67/100, but that's dumb. I don't know why I was expecting so much, lol.
The sound is cool. I like the production. I think he's a great producer. I just think the songwriting is lacking, musically and lyrically.
Some lyrics just totally seem free styled to fit the melody. I guess I wish it also had more electric guitar.
On the plus side, at least he's not relying on that Digitech Whammy so much.

my vinyl copy is sat at the post office because it wouldn't fit in my letterbox. won't have a chance to pick it up till saturday. am resisting temptation to dl illicitly, as that's not how a true white stripes fan should behave.

I get a feeling he doesn't really have much control of this beast he has created, but that doesn't make him a phony.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Saturday, April 21, 2012 8:02 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark

surely there have rarely been rock stars in more total control of the beast he created than Jack White!

I like the first song, "missing pieces," with it's great rhodes piano. I also like "blunderbuss," and the last song, "take me with you..." I also like the first two singles. I don't really hate anything on here.
I think I just had out of this world expectations.

Discovering that it was Meg who terminated the White Stripes, while Jack would have gone on indefinitely, has totally changed my reading of the lyrics. Like his divorce is a red herring and the subject of a song like Missing Pieces is actually Meg. Maybe this is the common reading but I listened to a review copy a lot before I found out how the split went down.

Quite like it so far.

sounds like a series of sketches, interspersed with back of fag packet moments.

I wasnt such a big fan of the 2nd Raconteurs album, though it had its moments, but I'm probably the only person who has a soft spot for the 2nd Dead Weather album

xp to Vegemite Grrrl

INSIDE LOOK: Jack White & Gary Oldman - Amex UNSTAGED

A live + Digital Music Experience April 27 9pm EST

http://www.youtube.com/user/JackWhiteVevo/unstaged

Discovering that it was Meg who terminated the White Stripes, while Jack would have gone on indefinitely, has totally changed my reading of the lyrics

she quit in the middle of a tour iirc?

like, it doesn't get more obvious than that

Ha, well I can't have been following it too closely then.

huh yeah i didn't know meg quit

iirc it was around the same time that a rumored sex tape of Meg was circulating (it was, not surprisingly, fake)

Now I know why you were following Meg's activities so closely.

http://www.chacha.com/question/does-jack-white-of-the-white-stripes-wear-makeup-to-look-so-white

I think there was some common agreement about the split.

Didn't the White stripes reconvene and carry on after Meg's break?

I suppose being an obsessive blues fan means rewriting the influences into nuevo misogynist bilge.

cuz "Sixteen Saltines" is crap.

the whole show is up, and it's not bad. it starts about 10 minutes in.

http://www.youtube.com/user/JackWhiteVevo/unstaged

the setlist:

with the girls backing

Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground
Missing Pieces
Freedom At 21
Love Interruption
Hotel Yorba
Two Against One
Top Yourself
I'm Slowly Turning Into You
Blue Blood Blues
Take Me With You When You Go

with the boys backing

Sixteen Saltines
I Cut Like A Buffalo
Weep Themselves To Sleep
Trash Tongue Talker
You Know That I Know
We're Going To Be Friends
Hypocritical Kiss
Hello Operator
Carolina Drama
Seven Nation Army

favorite misogynist moment is in "Top Yoursef," where he growls:

"How you gonna rock yourself to sleep, when I give up that midnight creep, girl...
Yeah how you gonna get that deep, when your daddy ain't around to give it to you..."

Finally picked this up - it's a lot better than I expected. Really love the middle group of songs, Love Interruption, Blunderbuss, Weep Themselves to Sleep ...the piano and slightly, I dunno, honky-tonk/country-fied approach really suits him.

I feel like he's still got a lot of artifice in his songwriting that he needs to get rid of. He feels too self conscious still or soemthing, like he's trying to prove something with his songs. I think if that ever goes away and he writes from the heart he'll be incredible.

I like the artifice, at this stage in the game a rich white guy playing blues-rock is about as artificial as you can get so he might as well play around with it.

This is a pretty good album, better than the Dead Weather at least, I agree that middle section is the strongest, although I need to give it time to sink in a bit more.

i think Get Behind Me Satan was pretty from the heart tbh. in fact i think most of jack's stuff is from the heart. its just that jack's got a weird heart.

I don't like thinking about artifice vs "from the heart" as a binary anyway but I think it's especially unhelpful with this record. The whole album is clearly about the emotions following a split with his bandmate and/or his wife, only dressed up in fantastical narratives.

he's a fraud cuz that one song sounds like the beginning of 'heart shaped box'

i think that binary is unhelpful with jack in general because he is a uniquely self-aware artist who nevertheless writes from a very wounded and self-involved perspective. every time i've interviewed him i've marveled at how he seems, simultaneously, unaffected and yet playing me as an interviewer. he is sharp as heck. i don't think this album is as 'plainly' about the split from karen/meg as you suggest, but i also think that's a prime motivator. the thing with jack white is, you never quite know when he's cluing you into how john gillis really feels. that's part of his magic, why he's more interesting than, say, the potatoes in the black keys.

Jack White is not a sexist!

http://www.paintingmania.com/arts/gustave-caillebotte/large/portrait-man-writing-his-study-151_8902.jpg

"Jack White... not... a... sexist. Got it."

This was a better response to the Jessica Misener article imo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/apr/27/jack-white-problem-women-laura-barton

certainly not since Dylan has an artist played with our perceptions the way that White does

Not to mention that White, né Gillis, did something the overwhelming majority of men are too threatened by women to do: he took his wife’s surname.

Where did he take it?

xp Yes well I'm not cosigning every line but I like the gist. I thought Misener's argument relied on cherrypicking, misreading and faulty information.

I think the article is fine, just pondering JWhite's 'use' of his wife's surname: Where did that happen?

Um, all the time? He calls himself Jack White, after Meg White. Or are you thinking of Karen Elson?

Well, yeah I was.

OK, being 'pka' is not the same as actually taking yr wife's surname in marriage.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/08/karen-elson-obtains-restraining-order-against-ex-husband-jack-white/

Somehow I missed that they'd even divorced, but this is a pretty gross development. Stop being a creep, Jack White!

White wanted Elson to contact their kids’ private school in an effort to get their kids out of a class in which another entertainer’s child was present. White said that he feels that entertainer 'ripped off' his music, the order said.

Any guesses as to who that might be?

He was just on the cover of Rolling Stone...

"Feel like he's still got a lot of artifice in his songwriting that he needs to get rid of. He feels too self conscious still or soemthing, like he's trying to prove something with his songs. I think if that ever goes away and he writes from the heart he'll be incredible."

This. Although I only think it's a problem when the tempo or volume drops. When its black math or rag and bone, it seems totally undeniable.